Stefano Domenicali remains optimistic that Ferrari can still close the gap to Mercedes, given that everyone has a lot of scope to improve this year.

In Malaysia Fernando Alonso eventually finished some 34.9s down on winner Lewis Hamilton, although he was at least able to hang onto the Red Bulls in the early part of the race. By co-incidence the margin in Australia was 35.2s. However, it would have been greater without the safety car.

“I don’t think the gap with Red Bull was so big to be honest,” he said. “Today we were suffering from the fact that with these hard tyres with this heat it was really about traction, the fact that they didn’t fit the cars as we wanted. I think that with Mercedes there’s still a big gap, with Red Bull, with the others, I’m not so sure.

“We’re more or less close to that field, but we aim to be on top. I think that for sure sure what we are seeing is not something easy to solve, but what I’ve asked to my engineers is to make sure that they know what they have to do and make sure they put in place plans to close the gap which so far is there, because it’s really clear.”

Domenicali was reluctant to suggest where the weakness in the package is.

“It’s difficult to say. When we speak about power unit, it could be the power delivery, because it’s part mechanical part electric, for sure that’s an important part. But also on the car side I want to make sure that the aerodynamic guys push the car to be more efficient, to be better.

“For sure we need to improve a lot the areas of power delivery, traction, efficiency of the car, set-up wise, balance wise, so we need to improve at all levels. With these new regulations the gaps will be shortened very quickly.”